~ film, flicks, movies, cinema, kennelco

Category Archives: Germany

A German fairy tale film of sorts, adapted from E.T.A. Hoffmann by Ernst Lubitsch, The Doll is an odd charmer, propelled in large part by the amusing performance of Ossi Oswalda, the girl who plays the would-be robot girl.

When a ne’er-do-well is told to get married or be cut off from his uncle’s inheritance, he runs to join a monastery (as you do). The monks realize that he is due to inherit a big wad of cash and recommend to him to hunt down the toymaker extraordinaire up on the hill and take one of his robot-women automatons as a bride. He takes this advice, finds the craftsman and sees his wares of life-size dolls and finds one to his liking. Only the dollmaker’s assistant accidentally breaks the doll, so the dollmaker’s daughter, on who the doll’s likeness was crafted, stands in for her.

It’s a light and strange little film, which opens with an odd piece in which a puppeteer sets up a stage and dolls to act out the film. The film is then essentially a “brought to life” doll world, which seems to be played out in some of the spartan sets in which backgrounds are crudely drawn on the walls at times. It’s not so much a story-within-a-story but it’s an odd conceit in a strange, sweet little romantic fairy tale.

Wherever it was that I read about Wetlands, it sounded kind of interesting. Adapted from a popular novel, it tells the semi-autobiographical story of a young woman who enjoy exploring her feminine sides in ways not typically associated with being “feminine”. She’s interested in body odors and excretions, rebelling against her upbringing of cleanliness staying unwashed, exploring sexually, taking drugs, speaking openly and living the life of an unfettered Id of sorts.

It struck me as something that could be fun — and it got good reviews.

Only, it’s terrible. And annoying. A fairly mainstream German romantic comedy with a scatological and gross-out heroine who gets a cut on her anus and has to have her hemorrhoids surgically removed.

My first thought was that maybe this film would have been better if directed by a woman. But then I realized that this film was probably just not a good film in any real way. The edginess of the subject matter is the only edginess it contains, and that edginess is dulled into an eroticized romance film with a more crass, though not more true or real, heart.

Carla Juri is okay as Helen, the somewhat pervy lead. But the film lacks any real subversiveness or genuineness.

I’m going through my biggest lag in time and backlog of films to write about for some years of late. I’ve been somewhat uninspired on the writing front, no reflection on the movies I’ve been watching, more my own state of being.

Case in point here, Volker Schlöndorff’s 1979 adaptation of Günter Grass’s novel of The Tin Drum. I first saw this movie on cable in the 1980’s. I think it was one of my first foreign films that I’d seen, or at least one of the first foreign films that I’d seen that really had a significant impact on me. NAot sure, but I can imagine having heard of it through Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel’s At the Movies show. Either way, it really struck me.

The strangeness of the film, the story of Oskar Matzerath (David Bennent), a boy who at the age of three decides to stop growing and stay small forever, all in the rising shadow of Nazi Germany. Highly metaphorical and to a large extent stylized with aspects of magical realism, the film is full of vivid and weird images and striking and powerful ideas.

I went on in life to read Grass’s novel, which is also brilliant, in fact featuring much more than is even entailed in this nearly three hour film. I’ve highly recommended it over the years and still do. Grass, of course, much later in life owned up to being a member of the Waffen SS, his greatest crime being in hiding that fact for so long and taking his particular moral stance. I don’t think that it shortchanges the novel or the film, but adds layers on the outside of the whole of the context.

I watched The Tin Drum with my kids, with whom I had discussed the film for a few years, especially in contexts of other films that dealt with similar time periods and subject matters. Oddly enough, they were somewhat ambivalent about the film. It is indeed very long and strange and harsh in ways, but I kind of assumed they would enjoy it more. Maybe they are too young for it.

David Bennent, 11 years old at the time of the film, is a strange and amazing figure, with his intense eyes and mien. Really, he is the film’s utter coup in casting.

A sort of spur of the moment movie choice, Clara and a friend of hers and I hunkered down and watched The NeverEnding Story, which neither was sure if they had seen before or not. I had watched it back about 8 years ago, but apparently sans children for whatever reason. Could be that I’d rented it but then it had turned out that Felix had already seen it or something. Clara might have been too young.

I had never seen it back in the day, but was surprised at liking it when I did watch it.

Apparently, it’s only the North American version that features the Limahl-crooned version of its theme song (which was penned by Giorgio Moroder). It’s quite funny to discus cheesy 80’s music with contemporary tweens.

The girls enjoyed the film. As did I.

Directed by Wolfgang Peterson, having just come off Das Boot (1981), the story of a boy who stumbles on a book that eventually sucks him into its fantasy (literally at the end) is really all about the amazing animatronics and other traditional FX and designs. Some of them are cooler than others. And some, like the signature luck dragon Falkor verge on the creepy clown side of cool, it’s still rich, wondrous fantasy rendered without the aids of computers but rather by more classical crafts and cinema magic.

Das Boot, the 1981 German War film about the lives of men on a U-boat in the Atlantic during 1941 made a massive splash in its day. I remember Siskel and Ebert talking about it and for the life of me, I’d say that it was the biggest foreign film in the United States for a long time.

I asked the kids if they wanted to watch “a three and a half hour German war film about a submarine” and was met with unsurprising disinterest. But I’d never seen the movie and have long had it on my list of movies to see.

It’s a riveting and compelling action drama. Wolfgang Petersen and cinematographer Jost Vacano wrest the most from their close-quarters sets, shooting the interior of the submarine and its tense, intense crew through their hunts, attacks, and even long stretches of downtime. It’s excellent, artful and masterful. The cast is great too, especially Jürgen Prochnow as the captain of the ship.

I don’t have lots to say, honestly. But it’s a great movie. I really liked it.

I’ve had this film in my queue for God know how long. So much of Fritz Lang’s body of work has lingered in my consciousness since childhood, even, though largely around his most famed Expressionist works Metropolis (1928) and M (1931). The Testament of Dr. Mabuse was often cited around these films, which makes sense, it was certainly of this period and has real ties to the film M it seems. Even more directly still, the film is a sequel to Lang’s silent film of Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922) and is even followed by The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse by Lang in 1960.

The Mabuse character was apparently taken from some popular literature at the time. Stories of master criminals who reigned supreme in the underground of the city. In this case, Dr. Mabuse (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) is locked up in a madhouse but incessently writes out his plans for anarchy and mass crime, which someone, it seems, is taking to the streets and playing out as if at his command.

It’s easy to see how well-situated Lang was for the American crime films. Mabuse is full of action and drama, including a couple trapped in a room rapidly filling up with water. And even though you have Otto Wernicke playing the same Inspector Lohmann character from M, the steadfast lawman is up against an evil genius from beyond the grave, a super villain almost more in need of a superhero to fight against. Really, he’s quite the Lex Luthor prototype.

And that is one of the interesting things about the film. The madness and genius of evil, whose goal is not greed by chaos, whose pervasive tentacles reach all around, controlling everything. It’s an interesting contrast to M in which the criminals are citizens as much as the people who do not inhabit the underworld. And even though the plot is overthrown in the end, the lingering thought is the strength and wiliness of the uber-criminal. Of course he will rise again!

So, now I’ll be going both backward and forward with Lang and Mabuse. I’ve had many others of Lang’s silent films queued up, waiting to see them. So much to see. So very very much.

I like Werner Herzog as well as anybody. He seems like a great guy to have dinner with. He’s made great films in both narrative and non-fiction and continues to knock movies out right and left on any number of interesting subjects. And whether the films are great or not, he manages to inject his own generous humanism to everything, often in his own gentle Germanic voiceovers.

Happy People: A Year in the Taiga was recommended to me by more than one person. It’s about a small village in a very isolated part of Siberia, on the edge of the massive wilderness of the Taiga, people utterly cut off from everything else much of the year. In particular, it focuses on the trappers who make their lives there, following them through an entire year of hard work, craftsmanship, and personal opinions on life and their world.

The film came about because it was originally shot by Dmitry Vasyukov for Russian television in a series of films with a much longer running time. Herzog became fascinated with the content and offered to edit the material for export into a 90 minute or so single documentary, with his own narration. Vasyukov agreed and Herzog had total control after that point.

This might seem sort of weird, but actually, Herzog’s best known documentary Grizzly Man (2005) evolved similarly as Herzog employed tons of footage that was shot by his subject, Timothy Treadwell. For that film, Herzog shot some interviews of his own and added more material, but you can see how the idea of re-editing someone else’s work into something new was a clear opportunity for him.

It’s easy to see inside Herzog’s mind in certain ways. He lays it all out there for you. He tells you what he thinks. You can see his interest in the way that much of the ways and techniques of these people of the Taiga capture his imagination because they are traditional and generally not modern. They live in commune with nature, a very rough and brutal nature so frozen and far away. But that these people are happy and satisfied, this is also his point and focus.

Actually, I think the title isn’t the best. Sure, they are happy. But they’re not that happy. It’s very interesting to watch. It’s usually quite fun to travel along Herzog’s trails around our world.

The second film of the Castro’s Fritz Lang double feature was his masterpiece, Metropolis. It was only a couple of years ago that I had seen it as part of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, that time with live accompaniment by the Alloy Orchestra. Certainly, you can’t beat a wonderful live performance with a silent film, but it was great to see it again.

I was enthused to see M (1931) and Metropolis, but I was keen to share it with the kids. I figured that it would be the more accessible of the two films. Hard to beat seeing it on the big screen.

I was again impressed, as I was the last time I saw it, by the dance sequence in which the false Maria lures the rapt, ogling stares of the men, eventually a panoply of eyes. To me, still the most vivid sequence in a wholly brilliant film.

I spent much of my childhood very curious about silent horror and science fiction films, wondering if I would ever get to see them, poring over the still images snipped from the films. I don’t think that is something I could or should even want to replicate in my kids. It was just the way it was in my childhood with my proclivities. It is, of course, one of the great films of world cinema.

The Castro Theatre features any number of films, double features, festivals or special events that I so want to go to but mostly miss out on. What makes certain showings more accessible or compelling is a combination of my own capriciousness and the capriciousness of my schedule. But when I saw that a double feature of Fritz Lang films, M (1931) and Metropolis (1927) were on the bill for the day, I very much felt compelled to take them in. On top of that compunction, I was keen to take Felix and Clara, too.

In reality, I figured that Metropolis was the more accessible of the two films, visual as it is, fantastical, far out, and with a robot. Also, it is not a film about a child murderer. But again, scheduling being what it is, Clara took the opportunity for a playdate and Felix and I took the opportunity for a double feature.

Not exactly a kid-friendly film, M doesn’t really even have a central star outside of Peter Lorre, the serial killer of children. And the film is not from his perspective. In fact, we only see his face as he reflects upon it in a mirror, tormented by his compulsions. He’s initially a shadow, then a mysterious figure. The rest of the film is an array of non-central characters: the police and the upright citizenry and the criminal underworld. Certain characters get more screen-time and focus, especially the chief detective and the head of the safecrackers, but the story is not about other individuals, rather it’s about humanity in its structural groups.

The detectives, as part of the establishment, work hard to find the killer. The criminals, due to pressure from the establishment, organize themselves to hunt the killer as well. Both converge at the same time, but the criminals hunt Lorre down first and set him to a trial in the basement of an abandoned factory. Though they all want his head on a stick, he is given a begrudging defense attorney and who argues that the child killer is a sick man and needs to be treated as such. What is fascinating about the way that this whole trial plays out is that the killer receives a fair trial but looks to still get lynched by the mob, only when the authorities finally step in and pull him away. We never hear what happens in the main court. Judgment is suspended. Punishment is ambiguous. The edict is one about protection and vigilance about one’s children.

Felix liked the film, though I’m not sure how well he kept up with the subtitles.

What I know about “dance” could probably not fill the average thimble. So, what I knew about choreographer Pina Bausch before the release of Wim Wenders’ documentary of her work, Pina, was nothing. About some subjects of documentaries, I have reasonable or good knowledge, about some, I have nothing. Which is totally fine. I’m just offering this caveat because Pina is almost all dance, Pina Bausch, and the reflections of her contemporaries.

Wenders (The American Friend (1977), Paris, Texas (1984), Wings of Desire (1987), Until the End of the World (1991), Buena Vista Social Club (1999), among many others) had originally planned this film with Pina Bausch as a collaborator. But Bausch died rather suddenly during production, and Wenders was urged on to complete the film by Bausch’s other collaborators.

It’s an overview of her major works, staged on stage, or with pieces in and around the city of Wuppertal where her Tanztheater (“dance theater”) was/is situated. What results is overview, memorial, and tribute, very loosely given to factual background. If you don’t know anything about Bausch, you won’t learn facts from the film. You will see her work, hear some voices of people who worked with her, learned from her, done in voice-over of their mute faces.

Certainly, the works are vibrant and impressive. I was struck by them and how little context I had to understand them outside of their own being. In one way, I was reminded of silent film acting, how the performers render everything physically, mutely, with all of the body. Of course, this is but a small thing, since their physicality is so intense, some of their actions so precise, some so dramatic. Far less straight-forward are these pieces. This is modern dance (if that term still applies) and in its modernism, it’s hardly simply literal. Abstract.

The film has a beauty and elegance to it, certainly. And I could appreciate it, to an extent. I don’t feel that I utterly get it in the sense that I usually like more context and understanding of things that I wind up writing about. It isn’t my area of expertise and I don’t know that my thoughts on this film would be all that beneficial or enlightening.